Originally Posted Sunday, April 6, 2014
Peter Matthiessen is dead. He was eighty-six. He was 86'd. What do you do when you come to the Buddha in the road? Take it. I met Matthiessen on a couple of occasions. He didn't seem to be a fun guy, but he wasn't in fun situations. He was "the author" who had performed once at the reading and was performing again at a reception with university people. There can be nothing duller than that, I think. I was certain that I was the only one in the room who had read everything by him, and it seemed that most people hadn't read anything by him. He was, shall I say--dour. So I took up with his wife, a woman who was much happier and who seemed to love being the wife of the author. Oh, Peter and I went. . . . Peter and I did. . . . She was a better performer than he. She was actually a very nice woman with whom I stayed on the couch for most of the evening. I had just gotten back from five weeks in Peru, and she and Peter had recently gone as well. We swapped stories. They were birders and there are a lot of rare birds there. They were adventurers, by and large, and didn't care much for this kind of artifice, but it was what paid the bills.
I knew a girl when I went to grad school in Anthropology. She was an undergrad, a beautiful, translucent girl whose father was friends with Matthiessen. Jesus, what was her name? It will come to me. Her father's father had been wealthy, and when he died, he left her father his lumbering concerns in Venezuela and his sugar plantations in Cuba. These were, of course, nationalized, first the timber then the sugar, and her father was for the first time in his life without means as they say. He became a writer much in the vane of Matthiessen. He was the first American to interview Castro, I believe. His career was taking off. The family was living in Mexico, and here is where the story gets good and murky. Her father was tinkering in the drug trade, she told me. He had a friend who was a big supplier. This friend of her father's, she told me, raped her when she was in her early teens. She never said anything for the supplier said he would kill her father if she told him. She believed him. And in the end, he did. Shot him in the head. There were drugs involved, but she was not clear on the details. Was her father working for the CIA? She thought he might have been.
There must have been some money left, for when I met her, she lived in a modest house on Key Biscayne. I stopped and stayed with her and her mother there for a few days on my way to Key West. I remember the manner in which they lived, or rather the manners, something inherited that can't be taught. I was an obvious hillbilly in their presence, but an educated and interesting one, perhaps. Her mother told me tales, too. Her husband had grown up knowing one of the Hemingway kids (I can't remember which one) and had been out fishing with Hemingway on the Pilar. He said Hemingway was drunk and nuts and would suddenly go mad and grab a gun and start shooting into the water screaming about the sharks. She told me this story before I later learned that Hem had shot himself in the calf doing exactly this. Later, back at the university library, I looked up everything I could find about her father. It was all true. He was even mentioned in one of Matthiessen's books about South America. The story was unbelievable but it was verifiable.
Today when I read Matthiessen's obituary, I was shocked to find that he had worked for the CIA when he was in Paris helping found the Paris Review. Cock sucker! It brought back to me the story the translucent blond told me about her father in Mexico. Could Matthiessen have recruited him, told him it was a way to get access as a journalist and to make more than a living?
Zoe. That was her name! I think it will be impossible to remember her last, but I surely want to now. I want to go back and revisit all that she told me, to read her father's articles once again. Where is she now? She lay naked on my bed in the dark one night, glowing. She was like some oceanic thing that could produce her own light. She was, I think, in love with me.
I lay in bed this morning befuddled. I drank too much alone and then took some sleep aid on top of that. My body and mind were wrecked. I was comatose, unable to move. No more of that, I thought. I am done. I began to think about a friend of mine from the factory whose wife just died. She had battled some rare relative of leukemia for many years. In the last two years, his health just went. He lost weight and looked like shit. Then he got dark blind spots in front of both eyes. His retinas were inflamed. He had to take early retirement because he could no longer drive. Doctors began injecting drugs directly into his eyeballs in an attempt to reduce the inflammation. He went through that every month for a year to no avail. I saw him once last year. He had come to the factory to fill out some paperwork. He looked like a war victim. Now with his wife gone. . . . They were high school sweethearts and had a very traditional midwest relationship. I thought of him lying in bed, unable to see but out of the sides of his eyes, now alone, perhaps desperate. No, that was me, I thought, and those were the years to come. I will change my life, I thought, I will live differently. I must concentrate.
The obituary spoke of Matthiessen's Zen practice. He was a Zen priest. Zen, he said, was about living in the present. We are always living in the past and in the future, he said. If we can live five minutes in the present every day, we have done a good job. The present is all that is real, he opined, all we have.
That's one way to look at it.
Matthiessen's work had a great impact on how I lived my life. I told him so. It was a silly thing to say to him, I knew, but what can you do. We talked about his days in Paris when he was one of the Tall Young Men. I wanted to do a coffee table book of pictures from that time, I told him, with anecdotes from all of them who had been there in the '50s. He was mildly interested. Later, when I talked to Plimpton about the project, he was very enthusiastic. Why I never followed up, I'll never know. O.K. I know. It is a character flaw. But Matthiessen, when we spoke of this, told me one thing that has stayed with me. "There are lots of writers with more talent," he said, "but nobody works harder at it than I do." His wife verified the statement. "Peter works incredibly at his writing. It is non-stop." I think it shows. He is not the most talented writer, and sometimes there is too much craft. But he lived his writing and was at the center of it, regardless. Now there will be no more of that.
Three cups of coffee and I am coming to. I will probably have the shakes tomorrow after not drinking tonight, but that will be better in a few days. I must force myself to drink water, a gallon of it every day. I can't possibly, but you need goals. Teas and soups of every and all kinds. I will have to have the surgery, I know. The knee will not heal on its own. This will be an aerobic summer if I can have it. Water and air and soups and teas, me lithe and limber and in the moment.
Peter Matthiessen. RIP.
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